AARL

Collecting Australian online publications

Margaret Phillips

The National Library has recently conducted a review of its collecting of Australian online publications. Hard though it is to believe, we have now been selecting online publications for archiving for seven years, and in view of the developments in online publishing during that time and the advances that have been made in archiving, it was timely to review the selection guidelines and our general approach.

When we decided to do the review, it was assumed that we would identify some new categories of online publications and that we would extend our collecting to include at least some of them. The review did indeed identify new types of online publications and looked again at some we had previously excluded. Ideally we would want to archive at least some examples of them.

However, the library is not in a position to assign additional staff resources to this activity and it came down to the choice between collecting a broader range of publications superficially, or focusing the collection activity and archiving defined areas in some depth. The review report recommended the second option - archiving defined areas in some depth. The full text of the report is at http://pandora.nla.gov.au/BSC49.doc.

The Collection Development Management Committee accepted all 21 recommendations from the review.

As a result the library will now focus collecting on six categories:

• commonwealth government publications (state government publications will be left to the state libraries)
• publications of tertiary education institutions
• conference proceedings
• e-journals
• items referred by indexing and abstracting agencies (which frequently are from the first three categories but also include items with print versions), and
• sites in nominated subject areas that would be collected on a rolling three year basis and sites documenting key issues of current social or political interest, such as election sites, Sydney Olympics, Bali bombing, Canberra bushfires.

In general, the following categories will not be collected, even though the review identified some value in doing so:

• online daily newspapers
• news sites
• discussion lists, chat rooms, bulletin boards and news groups
• CAMS, and
• blogs (except those that support the tertiary publications category).

I want to stress here that this is a broad guide to our approach. We would not want to exclude any site of high research value because it didn't fit into one of the six priority categories. We will continue to collect outside the priority categories as staff resources permit. We may also collect a very limited number of sites in the generally excluded categories. For instance, if a high quality CAM came to our attention and it supported one of the topical subjects, we would collect it.

We have always treated our selection guidelines with a great deal of flexibility and will continue to do so.

Portals and games will continue to be excluded as it is considered there are still good reasons for doing so.

The consequences of this approach are that the part of the archive contributed by the NLA will lose some of its diversity, but it will gain depth and historical perspective in nominated subject areas. What the library and partners do not archive is likely to be lost because, at this point in time, it is unlikely that anyone else will do so.

A positive outcome should be that this approach will enable us to define what we are collecting more clearly and to communicate this to publishers, researchers and other interested parties.

The next step is to rewrite the selection guidelines in line with the outcome of the review. This will include defining those subject areas that are to be revisited on a rolling three year basis.

Margaret Phillips is the manager Digital Archiving, National Library of Australia. E-mail m.phillips@nla.gov.au.nospam (please remove '.nospam' from address).